Across Time Zones with DrChrono’s Daniel Kivatinos

“Drchrono is a dynamic medical company that provides the core electronic health recordplatform, scheduling, patient reminders and billing system that every practice needs,” the site says. In short, the Silicon Valley start-up founded in New York 2 1/1 years ago is building technology for doctors that takes advantage of the mobility and efficiency of the iPad. Founder Daniel Kivatinos answered some questions for Betabeat about the medical industry and the Y Combinator accelerator program.

Q: Sooo, how’s YC?

A: YC is amazing. If you are thinking about building a great company, you should apply, they help every single company they work with from mentoring to funding. They will help you refine your business, tell you what will work and what won’t work.

There are a few things that make Y Combinator amazing. The first is the network. Since there are so many alumi, they are willing to give you help anyway that you need it. The alumi of YC is a really powerful network.

Q: You don’t work out of a central space, correct?

A: There is the YC space, people meet there for office hours and for a weekly meeting. You talk to everyone, show them your product, get feedback and hear amazing speakers.

There is someone who is part of YC who is in NYC who is supporting the NYC seen, Alexis Ohanian. He is one of the main reasons we joined YC. Alexis came to the Rose Tech incubator when we were there. It was really great to have him come out, meet us and support what we were doing, give us advice, etc.

Q: So you were at Rose Tech Ventures, which is no longer operating.

A: I loved that incubator. David Rose gave us some of the best support as we built our company. He didn’t have equity or a stake in our company, he just loves helping startups. He and his team would help advise us. David really helps to cultivate the startup scene in NYC.

Q: What do you think are the strengths and weaknesses of the NYC startup scene?

A: NYC has some of the best developers and entrepreneurs. The startup scene is amazing, there are so many incubators. The support you can find is amazing, though the investors are not as bold as in Silicon Valley.

Q: What do you mean by bold?

A: Investors in Silicon Valley are the best you can find. If they see amazing ideas, they will move fast to cultivate that idea but investing if they can. For example, Facebook–investors in Boston could have invested first, but waited. In Silicon Valley investors move fast.

Though NYC has some of the best entrepreneurs I have seen. A bunch of the YC companies are from NY. Tutorspree, MailGun and us.

Q: Do you still feel like you’re a ‘start-up’?

A: Of course we do! Our team is small and we are very agile.

Though that is a good question, when is a startup not a startup anymore. Three years into it, four years? Apple is still run like a startup from what I hear. The teams are very small to innovate.

Putting a time limit on when a startup is not a startup anymore is something hard to define. If the company is small and finding new ways to innovate all of the time, I think that is a key element. Innovation and creative thinking, people working on new ideas… we want to build out new innovative ideas all of the time, like using Facetime to allow doctors to chat with patients. No one has done it. You need agile people to make things like that happen.

Q: It’s pretty cool to see a start-up that is working in the health space. It’s not the sexiest.

A: Yup, it is an area that needs the hacker-like culture in it. Healthcare needs innovation. Software developers are just starting to see what they can do in healthcare. New things are poping up like http://rockhealth.com/, http://www.health2challenge.org/. Those are just two of the organizations that are pushing hackers into healthcare.

Q: what do you think is the technology that’s going to have the biggest impact on the healthcare industry?

A: Being mobile, using tablets to interact with patient data is one. Taking what we have learned from the interfaces and interactivity and applying that to healthcare. Simple design is very important. Mint.com, Squareup.com has amazing design, healthcare should also.